Conference Agenda

We will present the background, theoretical framework, methodology, and some preliminary findings of a project that aims to provide knowledge about how movement subject knowledge is conceptualised in physical education teacher education (PETE). Teachers need this knowledge to fulfil PE’s purpose of helping students develop what is in Swedish national curricula called “movement capacity” and “physical ability”.

The background for the project can be found in long-standing criticism of physical education (PE). For some time now, PE has been described as in a state of crisis due to declining legitimacy in education systems that increasingly value ‘academic knowledge’ (Hardman 2011), and/or due to current forms of PE being out of step with broader health and recreational trends (Tinning 2006). Kirk (2010) holds that, if not radically reformed, PE faces extinction as a school subject. Specifically, Kirk claims that movement knowledge is taught to students mainly in the form of decontextualized sport techniques in short bursts of practice that offer little in terms of learning.

In the Swedish context, national evaluations (SSI 2010, 2018) and research (Redelius & Larsson 2020) highlight PE’s struggle to evolve from an ‘activity subject’ to a ‘knowledge subject’, a transformation mandated in national curricula since 1994. These investigations of PE paint a picture where systematic attempts to develop movement knowledge are conspicuous by their absence (see also Larsson & Nyberg 2017).

Kirk (2010) proposes that PETE educators have a responsibility to lead reform in PE, and this includes defining subject knowledge. It is primarily PETE institutions that have the competence and critical mass for this purpose. Some researchers, however, suggest that PETE has itself been slow to change (Larsson, Linnér & Schenker 2018), that it has continued to emphasise traditional teacher knowledge (Mordal-Moen & Green 2014), and that it has struggled to present alternatives to movement knowledge that are not based on competition or fitness (Backman & Larsson 2013). Exacerbating PETE’s difficulty to lead knowledge reform is a tendency to distinguish between ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘academic knowledge’ (Herold & Waring, 2017).

Attempts to reform PETE have mainly focused on didactics and calls for the inclusion of socially critical perspectives (Larsson, et al 2018; Backman & Larsson 2013). We agree that didactics and critical perspectives are well worth attention in PETE. Still, without a clear definition of the subject knowledge, these efforts may prove literally baseless. Therefore, there is a need to define the subject knowledge required for the practice of the PE teacher profession. Similar work is carried out under the name content knowledge (CK) for physical education (see, e.g., Ward, 2013; Iserbyt, Ward & Li, 2017), but this research focuses primarily on student performance while we rather focus on students' movement knowledge.

Theoretically, the project is grounded in Young’s (2013) notion of powerful knowledge. The notion of powerful knowledge was developed in curriculum research because of ‘a neglect of the knowledge question itself and what a curriculum would be like if an “entitlement to knowledge” was its goal’ (Young, 2013, 107). Powerful knowledge concerns “specialized knowledge in contrast to everyday or contextualized knowledge. It is knowledge that can help students understand and explain the world and give them certain ‘powers’ in terms of capacity to move beyond their context-bound experience” (Carlgren 2020, 323). According to Young, powerful knowledge opens doors to new understandings and should be offered to all students in school.

Embodiment and embodied learning have emerged as significant topics in physical education and sport pedagogy over the last couple of decades. As a consequence, the pedagogical work done on, with and through the body has garnered research interest. A recent review of the literature on pedagogies of embodiment in physical education (Aartun et al., 2020) reported two thematic findings that characterized this literature: (i) enabling critical reflections and (ii) exploring (new) movements. Pedagogies of embodiment thus span the spectrum of pedagogical work concerning embodiment, from critical reflections on the social construction of the body to lived, embodied experiences of movement.

Research taking the latter approach to pedagogies of embodiment has for instance looked into how teachers can help students to notice, pay attention to and language one's own body as means towards developing movement capabilities and how experiences of enjoyment and meaningfulness are connected to movement learning and valuing physical activity (e.g. Lambert, 2020). Also, Aartun and colleagues found that exploring new movements could be a means towards ends such as developing trust within a group, more democratic forms of participation in PE as well as to challeng stereotypical ideas of movement cultures.

Within teacher education, there is a line of research on embodied learning and embodiment that explores how PETE can be conceptualized differently from more traditional and dualistic conceptions of the body in movement. Lambert (2020) advocated a re-conceptualization of PE and PETE by asking what an embodied form of PE and PETE might look like. By drawing on the work of P.J. Arnold, Lambert articulates the core of PE and PETE as "thinking ‘in’ movement (mind); intention ‘in’ movement (body); sensing ‘in’ movement (pleasure); sharing ‘in’ movement (other)" (p. 162). Nyberg, Backman and Larsson (2020) explored the meaning of movement capability for students in PETE and found four qualitatively different ways of experiencing movement capability: being able to move in order to achieve certain purposes, being able to iterate movements, experiencing various degrees of difference and aspects of moving and sensing one's own movement. Thus, both conceptually (Lambert, 2020) and empirically (Nyberg et al., 2020) the notion of exploring movements as a part of PETE have begun to be investigated. The purpose of this studyis to explore how PETE students experience learning new movements and to discuss the implications of these experiences for pedagogies of embodiment in PETE.

The theoretical perspective we draw on is Richard Shusterman's philosophy of somaesthetics, which concerns "the body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning" (Shusterman, 2012, p. 27). In particular, there are two concepts from Shusterman’s rich vein of writing that we tap into, namely pragmatic somaesthetics and _eeling better. More specifically, we are interested in the performative aspect of pragmatic somaesthetics, which “focus primarily on building strength, health, or skill, disciplines such as weightlifting, athletics, and martial arts” (p. 16). Within this category, Shusterman makes a further distinction between practices that are aimed at external appearance, such as the display of strength or skill, and practices that aim at inner experience. The latter concerns the notion of feeling better. The ambiguity of the notion is intended since it covers both the improvement of becoming more acutely perceptive of one’s inner experience of moving as well as heightening our satisfaction with being in movement.

It is well established that students in higher education need to develop evaluative skills in order to become effective learners (Guest & Riegler 2022). Assessment for Learning (AfL) is a model for assessment that strengthens learning in schools as well as in higher education (Black et al 2002). This is also the case in physical education teacher education (PETE) (Eather et al 2017, Macken et al 2020) and in school physical education (Leirhaug 2016). One of the key learning strategies in AfL is to activate peers as resources for learning, often operationalised as peer assessment. In PETE, peer assessment (or peer-assisted learning in a broader meaning) has proven to strengthen learning for both the observer and the observed (Lamb et al 2012).

One dimension of peer assessment, that has only scarcely been covered in the PETE context (Macken et al 2020) but that is more highlighted in research of peer assessment in general teacher education (see e.g. Kilic 2016, Tait-McCutcheon & Bernadette Knewstubb 2018), is the tensions inherent in giving feedback to peers on their work, peers who might also often be friends. According to Kilic (2016, 137) preservice teachers “do not feel comfortable when critiquing another student” and Tait-McCutcheon and Knewstubb (2018, 773) argues that “peer assessment could reflect friendships more than learning outcomes”.

Research demonstrates a complexity with regards to the potential for peer assessment in PETE. On the one hand, preservice teachers have expressed that giving feedback to peers creates a positive, safe, equal and relaxed learning environment (Lamb et al., 2012) and peer assessment has been reported to improve competence, confidence and self-efficacy among preservice teachers (Eather et al., 2017). On the other hand, a study by Macken et al. (2020) reported that preservice teachers believe their students would be mean to each other if implementing peer assessment during their school placement practice in PETE.

In this paper, we aim to further explore the complexity involved in peer assessment in PETE to get a deepened and more differentiated picture of this phenomenon. Our overall aim is to contribute to more knowledge about how to involve preservice teachers in PETE and students in school physical education as resources for learning without risking to cause harm. Drawing on the call from Scanlon et al. (2022) for more studies on how assessment is taught in PETE, our specific aim in this paper is to investigate preservice teachers’ views on what as well as how peer assessment is taught in PETE, to be used in school physical education. We will use Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of capital, as well as the work of Hay and Penney (2013) on how accountability mechanisms functions in assessment, in order to analyse what is assigned value in peer assessment. The two questions that will guide our analysis in this paper reads: What mechanisms are assigned value in peer assessment according to preservice teachers in PETE? And: How do the mechanisms that are assigned value in peer assessment in PETE function according to preservice teachers? More knowledge about the what and the how in teaching of assessment practices in PETE can improve these practices within school physical education.